


in cold water

by Wagandea



Category: Zero Escape (Video Games)
Genre: Alternate Timelines, Dark, M/M, Manipulative Aoi, Not VLR and ZTD Compliant
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-05-22
Updated: 2018-05-22
Packaged: 2019-05-10 03:28:40
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,598
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14729099
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Wagandea/pseuds/Wagandea
Summary: --But there's no timeline where Aoi doesn't put the gun to Ace's head and wonder what it would feel like to pull the trigger. He'll fuck Ace and he'll fuck Ace over, but he won't give him this.





	in cold water

**Author's Note:**

  * For [OllieTamale](https://archiveofourown.org/users/OllieTamale/gifts).



There are infinite timelines, or so he’s told. Akane explained it to him once, face unpleasantly red and cheeks puffed out in frustration, hand drawn diagrams spread over a kitchen table they hadn’t sat at together for a long time. This, apparently, was evident to everyone sensitive to the fields but him. Maybe he just didn’t have the same _resonance_ , Aoi thought, and then there is _Ace_.

He calls him Ace now, that’s the narrative in his head, and maybe it’s the separation that’s important. Hongou is some different, distant, far away monster from their past; it’s too easy too think this. (This is how he might explain his behavior, rationalize it to himself. It’s a lie. He knows Ace is Hongou, he’s painfully aware of that fact, it’s just that he doesn’t _care_. Or, that’s why this is happening in the first place. That’s hard to stomach.)

There are infinite timelines, Akane explained to him, and Aoi feels a phantom impression of hands on his hips. Psychic bleedthrough, or an overactive imagination.

Aoi used to have nightmares, not wet dreams, and now there’s not really a difference.

\--He wants to say it started around Door 6, the faint image of three other timelines behind him, like Ace has gotten into his head or they’ve just spent too much time together, but it’s _excuse excuse excuse_.

Behind Door 4, the first time, Ace puts his hand on Aoi’s shoulder, squeezes hard. _Good job_ , he murmurs in the freezer doorway, the aftermath of solving a puzzle, and his hand is very cold. Akane is somewhere else, burning up, but Aoi is the one who feels struck down with a fever.

It’s nothing to read into. _Good job,_ he did a good job, they _both_ did a good job, two men acting as though they didn’t know the answer to escape long before they were put in the room again. It could be fatherly, playing the kindly old mentor. Aoi’s stomach turns, and the second time he wants those cold hands _elsewhere,_ to soothe the burning under his skin.

He was never supposed to be the one Ace set on fire. But there are plenty of other things Ace is _supposed_ to do to him, aren’t there? The knife, repeated twice, and Aoi yelling _get the fuck away from me you bastard_ , but they both know what’s going to happen next and it’s a sharp pain, a clean pain.

Ace slides the knife into his back, and then they’re in the cargo room and Ace has his hand splayed over bare skin, the feeling of his fingers working over Aoi’s spine, pushing him down over a crate. That _fuck_ that escapes his lips is a little less innocent, a little more desperate, and who _knows_ where Junpei and Akane are--

“Look, Ace, it’s a snowman secret meeting!” he says, with too much force behind the joke. Ace frowns at him, brow furrowed. Ace pulls Aoi’s hips back into him, roughly, and when Aoi lets out a strangled noise, _standing there alone, fully clothed, just standing next to Ace_ , Junpei looks at him like he’s gone crazy.

There are infinite timelines, but this _isn’t_ one of them.

 

\--

 

There was a timeline, though, where Aoi made the wrong choice, where he followed Hongou home with either the intention of going to bed with him or to satisfy the curiosity of knowing if he _could._ It didn’t start that way.

It goes like this:

Aoi has been tracking Hongou’s movements for a long time. Calling it an obsession seemed too cliched, makes Aoi feel uncomfortably like some movie character, the wronged kid all grown up and seeking revenge. But he’s been tracking Hongou’s movements for a long time, and this week, the week before the game, he’s following him to track his schedule, figure out where and when to strike.

And one night after work, Hongou goes to a bar. Aoi wants to talk to him, he just wants to talk, call it a morbid fascination with what’s going on in that man’s head. What is he thinking, what can he possibly be thinking? The kicker, of course, is that Hongou’s actions tonight are not so obscure. He’s like any other charming, confidant older man in that bar, and he doesn’t recognize Aoi from first name alone.

He takes Aoi home and pours him a cup of coffee and laughs at any crude jokes about the age difference. ( _Old man_ , Aoi calls him scornfully, but then Hongou is smiling like he thinks that’s actually _funny,_  and Aoi is smiling despite himself too but he feels _sick_.) He takes Aoi home and kisses him after the cups are empty, bittered with coffee and sloppy from the alcohol. He takes Aoi home and then he rolls over and lets Aoi _fuck_ him, and god that makes it so much harder to live with.   
  
“Good boy,” Hongou says lightly after, ruffling Aoi’s hair, and the wrinkles at the corners of his eyes crinkle up softly in amusement, a continuation of the _dirty old man_ jokes from earlier, but Aoi’s heart flutters in his throat and he feels suddenly very, very warm.

( _“You shouldn’t play with your food before you eat it,” Ace snarls after he puts the pieces together, outside the incinerator room with a gun to his head._

 _He shouldn’t feel bad about that, about doing anything to Ace, it’s just--he never wanted to be that kind of person, never wanted to turn into the monster. He wishes he could blame Ace, but Aoi didn’t have to follow him home that night and they both know that._ )

Hongou’s apartment is too spacious and lonely for one person, and too normal for Hongou. He was expecting some evil mad scientist’s lair, not photos on the walls and a sink of dishes and an elderly pet cat. He was expecting a lot of things, and looking behind the curtain is dangerous.

He cannot risk humanizing this man. Hongou’s bedroom is cold, and Aoi dreams of burning.

 

\--

 

Aoi isn’t psychic (not like _that,_  not with the inhuman precision his sister has regarding future events), but there are a few things he knows.

Ace has no family, and as of the shower room, no friends. He’s a workaholic, he doesn’t have a personal life to speak of--except those infrequent nightly excursions to Kabukicho, the ones Aoi is so intimately familiar with. Maybe it’s out of a misplaced sense of obligation or guilt, or maybe it’s just for the hell of it, but when Ace goes to prison, it’s Aoi who volunteers to sort out his stuff.

It feels more like he’s going through the belongings of a dead person, really, that second time he’s in Ace’s apartment. Aoi boxes up clothes and soap and an unopened toothbrush from the bathroom drawer, fumbles through the unfamiliar rooms and is surprised at how little this all means to him.

Aoi only sticks around long enough during visiting hours to hand the box off to the prison guard to check over. “See ya,” is all he says, nonchalantly, hands in his pockets, because Ace won’t look at him anyway.

He takes the cat home, though, and tells Akane it was a stray.

(Years later, long after Akane’s fucked off doing who knows what, Aoi sends him a card at Christmas. Just a cheap generic one from the convenience store, white-haired Santa Claus on the front. He can’t figure out what to write in the card-- _sorry_ , or _thanks_ , or _see ya_ , none of it means shit--so he just doesn’t, sends that blank card and puts Ace out of his mind for a long time.

He doesn’t see Ace again until Aoi’s on his way to being an old man too, and maybe Ace has mellowed out from the prison time or maybe he’s just _tired_. Aoi gets it. They don’t talk as Aoi drives him back into society, the prison a speck on the horizon behind them, but they share a cigarette outside the empty husk that is Ace’s apartment before they part ways.)

 

\--

 

“You shouldn’t play with your food before you eat it,” Ace snarls, and in unison Aoi says:

“I _know_ ,” like that might stop Ace from saying it. He’s tired of this, he’s done this one before. Aoi clenches his jaw hard. The barrel of the gun must feel cool against Ace’s temple. Aoi still has phantom, burning handprints on his hips. Ace says that even in the timelines where everything went _right_ , and Aoi doesn’t know how to deal with this constant shifting.

“If you’re going to kill me,” Ace continues, with venom and an aching certainty, “ _get it over with_.”

He wonders if any of his other selves had the courage to pull the trigger. Aoi thinks about it, sometimes, and maybe he wants to be the kind of person who could.

Akane’s run ahead already, towards fresh air and the open sky; but here Aoi is weighed down, wrestling monsters. Ace wasn’t supposed to live anyway, this was never part of the plan, it’s all Aoi’s _stupid_ conscience saving him, because hey, rotting in prison is so much better than dying, right?

Except, it doesn’t quite go that way. Aoi knows what happens at the end. He wants a cigarette.

“Kill me,” Ace says, and Aoi kisses him instead, pushes him against the outside incinerator wall hard enough to bruise and--well, if Ace kisses him back, at least he knows which timeline he’s really living in even if the rest were imagined.


End file.
